Bryn Mawr Classical Review 96.6.11

Reviewed by Robert Lamberton and Susan Rotroff,
Washington
University, rdlamber@artsci.wustl.edu and
srotroff@artsci.wustl.edu.

The Festschrift
is to scholarship what haute cuisine is to home cooking: an extreme
of extravagance and indulgence. It is the recipient who is supposed to
indulge and to enjoy the feast. But the reviewer -- presumably the only
reader, between editor and recipient, to read from beginning to end -- is
the recipient's parasitos. As reviewers, we have savored this
privilege far too long (over three times the BMCR limit of three months),
but let it be our excuse that this banquet of thirty-one courses is
conceived on the scale of that of Athenaeus and might challenge the
appetite of a Herakles. Even taking into account the 208 black and white
illustrations and two color plates, the nearly 600 oversized pages of
The Ages of Homer must contain well over 400,000 words.

For
all its extravagance (and in part because of it), the Festschrift as a
genre labors under a cloud of suspicion. Over time, many an article has
languished in a desk drawer, blighted by the lingering effects of
editorial and/or referee abuse in infancy, only to find its little patch
of sunlight in a Festschrift. What the journals could not appreciate, the
Festschrift editor often cannot refuse. At its best, however, the genre
brings together around the personality and accomplishments of a major
scholar (such as Emily Vermeule) a constellation of studies that
illuminate the state of a field of inquiry. The Ages of Homer is by
any standard an outstanding Festschrift, and among its 31 articles are
nearly a dozen that will be appreciated as real advances in the discussion
of one Homeric problema or another -- perhaps an unprecedented
percentage. (At one stage in our attempt to write this review, we tested a
Siskel-and-Ebert approach: a dozen articles got "two thumbs up," nine of
them "two enthusiastic thumbs up.")

Before turning to the
specifics, however, it is important to note that the illumination cast by
this collection on the present state of Homeric studies does not spare the
cracks and wrinkles. As Carter and Morris make clear in their elegant
"Introduction", the editors have exhibited tolerance to the point of
pluralism, not to say contradiction. For example, if Walter Burkert's
important contribution here is correct and its implications such as they
would seem to be, then much of the discussion of Homer and Bronze Age
realities in Part I and elsewhere becomes an enterprise that might have
emerged from the imagination of a Borges: scholars working with
recalcitrant, undatable texts, along with equally recalcitrant and often
unprovenanced artifacts, to inscribe in a history of the Bronze Age what
is for all practical purposes a fictional narrative, divorced by half a
millennium from that history. No one will doubt that it is the greatness
of Emily Vermeule to have kept all of these wobbly missiles in the air at
once -- to have written with extraordinary authority about archaeology,
about material culture, and about the evidence of texts. One of the
lessons of her Festschrift is that her ability to do so is one shared by
few others.

Of course, not all of the contributors set out to
match Emily Vermeule's breadth and virtuosity, and most in fact keep to
their own more modestly defined areas of research. The editors have
divided the thirty-one articles into three chronological groups, entitled
respectively "Homer and the Bronze Age: Memory and Archaeology," "Homer
and the Iron Age: History and Politics," and "After Homer: Narrative and
Representation," and in so doing they superimpose an orderly symmetry on
what is, inevitably, a very disparate body of material.

Six
articles constitute primary (or virtually primary) publications of
artifacts, to which are assigned dates ranging from the fourteenth century
BCE to the time of Augustus. Among these, a group of Mycenean sherds from
Saqqara is alone in having a known archaeological provenance. Among the
unprovenanced is a small "geometric" bronze in the Getty, sumptuously
illustrated over life-size on the dust jacket, both coming (front) and
going (back), and representing a lyre-player accompanied -- Perhaps, led?
Could he be blind? -- by a boy. If the group had been commissioned as
cover-art for this volume, it could hardly have been better conceived or
executed for the purpose -- but, leaving the artist's identity and motives
aside, let us just say that the piece is ...ben trovato.

These six articles constitute a methodologically coherent group, but the
remaining twenty-five are not so easily assigned to cubbyholes. Though
Homer and perspectives on Homer provide the glue that binds the collection
together, there are nevertheless about half a dozen contributions
(including, not surprisingly, several of the six discussed above) in which
Homer is never mentioned, or mentioned only in an opening or closing
gesture. A further, overlapping, group of six articles is purely
descriptive of artifacts, offering little interpretation beyond adducing
comparanda. Another group of about the same size might be classified as
historical, in that the authors undertake to relate the text of Homer to
historical realities -- whether of the Bronze Age or the Geometric. Some
of those articles, along with seven others, explore the relationship
between
the text of Homer and the archaeological record. Finally, there are six
articles that focus exclusively -- or nearly so -- on issues relating to
the text of Homer, its generation, nature, and interpretation.

There
is clearly no question of providing useful or even adequate summaries of
such a disparate body of material in a review. The editors, in fact, do a
remarkably good job of providing just such an overview in their
"Introduction" and reviewers are unlikely to improve on their efforts.
Without belittling the other pieces, however -- almost all received at
least
one "thumb up" -- we want to call attention to a few of those we found the
most rewarding. Walter Burkert's "Lydia Between East and West or How to
Date the Trojan War: A Study in Herodotus" is a characteristically lucid,
concise, and devastating demonstration of the classical Greeks' ignorance
of the events of the Bronze Age. We mentioned above the tension between
this article and the enterprise of a number of the others: to match up a
more-or-less eighth-century poem with Bronze-Age "realities." As
fascinating and seductive as the latter mode of inquiry is, Burkert's
article should be required reading for all those inclined to embark upon
it. Mabel Lang's "War Story into Wrath Story" could not be more different,
methodologically, from Burkert's piece. Relying largely on internal
evidence, she builds a scenario -- her own description of the procedure as
"trial-and-error speculation" (158) is too harsh -- to account for the
genesis of the Iliad, or more specifically, to show how a
panhellenic poem like the Iliad might have emerged from an
amalgamation of local traditions. That something of the sort in fact
happened, most of us would probably agree -- and none, Lang included,
would
claim that it has to have happened in just the way she suggests -- but she
asks interesting questions and makes her reader see the Iliad in a
new light. In "An Evolutionary Model for the Making of Homeric Poetry:
Comparative Perspectives," Gregory Nagy makes another important
contribution to the same debate, though in his case the terms of that
debate have been hyper-refined in a long series of major and minor
contributions. What he adds here is an important piece in the puzzle:
comparative evidence, the bulk of it from India, is adduced to throw light
on the evolution of epic traditions and specifically on the role the
Panathenaia might have played in the diffusion and fixing of the Homeric
poems. In "The Sacrifice of Astyanax: Near Eastern Contributions to the
Siege of Troy," Sarah Morris makes some ingenious and unexpected
connections to support the notion that the Near Eastern custom of
sacrificing children to save a city under siege may find belated and
distorted representation in the Greek story of Astyanax, who in story is
thrown from the walls by the victorious invading army, but in art is
depicted as a sacrificial victim. We wonder if "A Dancing Floor for
Ariadne (Iliad 18.590-592): Aspects of Ritual Movement in Homer and
Minoan Religion," will be the last to appear of Stephen Lonsdale's rich
and eloquent contributions to the cultural history of dance, now that we
have lost him at such a tragically early age. It is, in any case, an
admirable contribution, exposing an unexpected sinister side of a familiar
passage. Erika Simon's "Early Images of Daidalos in Flight" is an
iconographic essay characterized by stunning clarity and efficiency of
argument, establishing a highly plausible case for identifying a series of
winged figures in "Knielauf" as Daidalos. In "Priam, King of Troy,"
Margaret Miller starts from the observation that in Attic iconography
"Priam orientalizes two generations after other 'Oriental' kings," (449)
and develops an exceptionally persuasive claim that we can see in such
developments the evolution of "the popular Athenian worldview" in response
to larger political developments (460). Finally, Cornelius Vermeule's
"Neon Ilion and Ilium Novum: Kings, Soldiers, Citizens, and Tourists at
Classical Troy" is a wonderful and valuable assemblage of the evidence for
the history of what the current excavators sometimes call "post-war" Troy,
the classical city that stood on the mound Schliemann was to excavate. He
integrates the numismatic evidence into the literary in a tour-de-force
that leaves no doubt that the city of the era that turned the Troad into a
Homeric theme-park is every bit as fascinating as the one heroized by the
Iliad.

Those are just eight of the essays we found most
attractive, helpful, or informative. This is a collection that addresses
itself in its entirety to one reader, Emily Vermeule. A very large number
of readers, however, will find in it a great deal to be learned and to be
enjoyed. Few Festschriften are addressed to a broad audience, and few are
produced or marketed in anticipation of significant sales beyond the
research libraries. This is emphatically not the case here: The University
of Texas Press has produced a volume worthy of its ceremonial function in
the career of a tremendously influential scholar and educator. It is
lavish, and very attractive. Perhaps most remarkable of all, its modest
price is a clear indication that it has been kept deliberately within the
range of a wide readership, one that it richly deserves. It is a pleasure
and an honor to be invited to Emily Vermeule's feast.